Auricerise's Bulletins
A list of resources that may be helpful to you for your OCs and worldbuilding needs. My Wordpress is far more extensive in terms of resource sharing and I update my directory there instead, so I'll be linking to relevant pages through this post here instead.
🖼️ ✏️ Visual + Writing
- Visual + Writing Resources List: Characters
- Visual + Writing Resources (Environment and World Building)
🖼️ Visual Inspiration
I doubt anyone is gonna notice but if you see 'Blazithae' on my characters and worried that I stole art or whatever, I'm the same creator (I used to be Blazi, but I would like to be called Auri or Cerise). I made a change to my online alias and brand and just didn't bother to make an announcement on my Toyhouse (only did so on my social media mains, Toyhouse not being one of them).
Anyway, I'm not going to necessarily update my logos on existing works because that's just too much damn work lol. Buuut for anything from here on out, they will have the updated naming. :>
- Auri
Here's a list of resources that may be helpful to you for your OCs and worldbuilding needs. My Wordpress is far more extensive in terms of resource sharing and I update my directory there instead, so I'll be linking to relevant pages through this post here instead.
🖼️ ✏️ Visual + Writing
- Visual + Writing Resources List: Characters
- Visual + Writing Resources (Environment and World Building)
Here's my rather meticulous process of how I do my character concept design sheets! The character featured here is Dracotian Lord Fromir from PC: Antecedents Aryhies.
Although I technically should explore more design concepts rather than just the one, I'm usually satisfied with one look. If it ever comes down to character design commissions, there is no doubt I will include more than just one rough concept design.
[Decided to move my statement about my creations into a bulletin post for a cleaner profile. Also as a heads up, I am going to put some content warnings (nothing NSFW, it's just thematic wise). I also added in extras to my statement for any curious folk out there!]
My Original Character (OC) Focus and Statement
I base my OCs on fantasy JPRGs, anime style wise. I generally avoid designing modern style characters because I like creating my character outfits and settings that break the norm, which is something I can appreciate about the fantasy genre. In addition, I already see modern outfits in real life on a day-to-day basis (don't get me wrong, I love wearing casual clothes and work wear!), so I personally like seeing a change of aesthetics from time to time as a form of escape. One of the common themes you'll find amongst my OCs is me making fun of popular tropes and breaking the stereotypes of stock characters in fantasy settings. Of course there will be cliches and tropes around anyway, but I do my best at making my OCs standout as much as I can.
I definitely don't consider my designs to be final for most of my OCs since I've really only focused in on concept designs, hence the generic poses for nearly all of their concept drawings. A lot of their traits I want to add are missing (E.g. Wings) because I just wanted to finish up old and empty dollar store sketchbooks that's been sitting around for over a decade and I didn't want them to go to a waste. My (creative) writing isn't that good as I focus on the visual side of things; however, a brief description and a few words describing my characters are in place when I get around to creating a new character and drawing them up from scratch.
With that being said, you will be finding work dating back to 2016 and even before that; my pieces may not be in chronological order. I have a ton of OCs and will be editing them quite often over time, alongside with adding a number of old art pieces.
Inspiration and Influences
As mentioned, I'm heavily and overall inspired by anime, fantasy, and video games (notably JRPGs). Some of the works and artists I'm inspired by (not limited to) are: MapleStory (2), Ragnarok Online, Tales of, Final Fantasy, Disgaea, Kazuki Yone, Naoyuki Onda and Keiichi Satou (notably on their work on Shingeki no Bahamut), Fire Emblem, and The Legend of Zelda.
I don't create my characters based off of anything in particular, I'd say half of the time I wing it while the other half is either I end up improvising it first, then attach some sort of meaning later or I actually do want to make a character based off of something. For example, I intended Naydal to be just a regular Merphan (a race of mermen and mermaids) who gets lost on land as opposed to lost at sea and finds human men attractive, but then I thought about The Little Mermaid (by Hans Christian Anderson) and attached some elements from the characters to her -- instead of Naydal (the mermaid) falling in love with a prince, she's obsessed with romance novels and is a total fan girl! Satsuma is based off of and named after the satsuma citrus. The only time where my OCs are based off of another character are the ones I made in MMORPGs I play, but with major adjustments (only minor things like hair colours are kept). A notable example is Sereina, where I based her off of my Heavy Gunner from MapleStory 2.
Visual design wise, I never use anything like picrew or any other visual simulators to help create my characters (I'm too prideful in that area) unless it is an MMORPG character I made (as mentioned). My designs are done mainly through my imagination and when the situation calls for it, a lot of research and topic exploration is involved.
I'll likely add more to this post later in the future!
200+ characters have been uploaded onto my Toyhouse over a span of a few days...goodness I'm exhausted. Some of them haven't even been uploaded because I've no art for them or it's way too outdated (aka me being nitpicky and wanting to do a recent drawing of them). I'll still be uploading new characters here and there, alongside with old + recent artwork, but things will definitely be slowing down for certain.
On writing side of things, I'll definitely update a lot of the character profiles once I fix a ton of grammar mistakes in my Word document files and whatnot. Some of the lore will be added to my original series (Perennial Centuries).
Sorry if I'm spamming anyone's inboxes -- I have over 200 original characters (maticulously created all of these concept art drawings over a span of 4 years and including SOME of the writing from my Word documents because I pay that much attention to detail). Once I get them and my Fan OCs uploaded, things should slow down. I mainly just want to dump all of my OCs into a neat looking site for my friends and viewers to see.
- Blazi